Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, And Steel is the very model of a popular science book. It begins with a vexing question that most people can't answer without implicit racism—why did some peoples develop advanced technology while others didn't?—and answers it with stunning erudition backed by detailed, surprising evidence. With Guns, Germs, And Steel, Diamond, an ornithologist by trade, won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and demonstrated his now-legendary ability to select and integrate findings from many scientific disciplines. Seven years later, he's unveiled Collapse, an account of the varied but connected ways civilizations have plunged into catastrophe. Equally magisterial and sociologically compelling, yet often more entertaining and accessible than Guns, Germs, And Steel, Collapse tours the fall of human empires with a detective's sense for telling clues and a prophet's ear for apocalyptic phrases.
"What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Diamond muses in the midst of his mesmerizing description of that island society's death throes. The question reflects one side of his approach: direct appeal to readers' imaginations in moments of literary re-enactment. He counterbalances those vivid scenes—parts of a wide-eyed, present-day travelogue that meanders throughout the text—with forensic investigations into ancient history. Diamond considers the role played by climate, resources, and cultural practices in each society. He surveys historical, recent, and threatening collapses in Polynesia, the American Southwest, Africa, Iceland, the Yucatan, Australia, and Montana. The last, one of the most unlikely locations to see impending doom, turns out to be the linchpin of Diamond's argument. This relatively unspoiled location, harboring worsening environmental problems and class conflicts, siphons 50 percent more resources from the federal government than it returns. If Montana were an island, it would die.
It's not an island, of course. But societies isolate themselves in ways beyond geography. They fight with their neighbors, exhaust their supply lines, turn on internal enemies, and wager too heavily on marginal livelihoods. Diamond focuses on the environment in most of his examples, but the message doesn't reduce to ecological doom and gloom. His greatest achievement may be his imaginative, convincing rethink of the Rwandan genocides. Ethnic hatred by itself has little explanatory power and offers almost no program for action, since most people assume that different ethnic groups are doomed to warfare throughout history. (See any random letter to the editor about the Palestinian situation.) Instead, Diamond argues, the genocide should be seen as a particularly horrifying side effect of a Malthusian collapse—population outstripping resources—in one of the most densely packed nations in Africa. Collapse could replace a thousand environmental harangues on the world's bookshelves. Its reason, passion, and above all, creative imagination make it the last word on the avoidable disasters that end civilizations.